"Rhythmic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... light of a tempestuous sunset, the wind steadily and loudly blowing from off the bar across the tossing and moaning waste of waters, driven inland; with scores of gulls and white sea-birds flying and shrieking round me,—those wild voices of Nature mingled strangely with the rhythmic roll and beat of the poet's impassioned music. The very spirit, or dark genius, of the troubled scene appeared to take up and to repeat ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... factory. Motive is largely a matter of instinct with the child, and he may, indeed, be perfectly satisfied with a school task just as it stands. For example, we all know that children enjoy the right kind of drill. Repetition, especially rhythmic repetition, is instinctive,—it satisfies an inborn need. Where such a condition exists, it is an obvious waste of time to search about for more indirect motives. The economical thing to do is to turn the ready energy of the child into the channel that is already open to ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... the toes of his feet; a depth of joy in which all that is painful and somber serves, not as a contrast, but as conditioned, as demanded, as a necessary color in such an overflow of light; an instinct of rhythmic relations which overleaps vast spaces of forms; all happening in the highest degree involuntarily, but as if in a storm of sensations of freedom, of infinity, of power, of divinity.—This is my experience of Inspiration; I doubt not but that one must needs ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... half-past eight and very dark, for the moon is not yet up and the sky is overcast. The air is fresh and sweetly damp and redolent of many scented leaves and flowers. I can hear the sea on Apia beach; the sound of it is regular, like hoarse breathing, or even more like the rhythmic purring of a gigantic cat. Crickets and tree frogs and innumerable other insects and small beasts are chirping and pecking with various noises that mingle harmoniously. Occasionally a bird calls with a startling cry—perhaps the very bird ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... noticed some stars advancing and others receding. He associated their dawn and setting with certain seasons of the year. He had a poetic nature, and he read night by night, and month by month, and year by year, the poem of the constellations, divinely rhythmic. But two rosettes of stars especially attracted his attention while seated on the ground, or lying on his back under the open scroll of the midnight heavens—the Pleiades, or Seven Stars, and Orion. The former group this rustic prophet associated with the spring, as it rises about the first of ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... not more than half a minute peering in the direction from whence came the rhythmic bang of the anvil,—at no great distance, he was convinced,—when some one spoke suddenly at his elbow. He whirled and found himself facing ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... fossil remains have been obtained. The fertile and superstitious imagination of the negroes has not been idle in such a suggestive field, and they have peopled these fountains with spirits which they call "cymbies," akin to the undine and the kelpie. On Saturday nights you may hear a strange rhythmic, thumping sound from the spring, and looking out you may see by the wild, fitful glare of lightwood torches dark figures moving to and fro. These are the negro women at their laundry-work, knee-deep in the stream, beating the clothes with heavy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... seemed to me ministers of inexorable Olympus, executing an Olympian decree. And the building seemed to me a live victim, a scapegoat suffering sullenly for sins it had not committed. To me it seemed to be flinching under every rhythmic blow of those well-wielded weapons, praying for the hour when sunset should bring it surcease from that daily ordeal. I caught myself nodding to it—a nod of sympathy, of hortation to endurance. Immediately, I was ashamed of my lapse into anthropomorphism. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... whoop, caught up by the cliffs of the Tyuonyi, echoes and re-echoes, a prolonged howl dying out in a wail. Men's voices, hoarse and untrained, are now heard chanting in rhythmic and monotonous chorus. They approach slowly, moving with measured regularity; and now strange figures begin to emerge from the passage-way, and as they file into the court-yard the chant grows ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... never spoke, though every rosy foot-fall broke The dust, the dust to Eden-bloom; and, past the throbbing blue, All ordered to her rhythmic feet, the stars were dancing with my sweet, And all ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... the individual baby, combining in large numbers, becomes a deep monotone, like the waves of the sea, a sort of violoncello accompaniment to all their holiday performances. It was rather trying to me at first to have my glowing periods punctuated with a rhythmic wail from all sides of the hall; but as soon as I saw that it did not distract my hearers, I simply raised my voice, and, with a little added vehemence, fairly rivaled the babies. Commenting on this trial, to one of the ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... said, "I smell thee by some passive divination, I am satisfied with insight of the measure of thine house; What had happened I conjecture, in a blank and rhythmic passion, Had the aeons thought of making thee a ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... she, in answer to his expression of astonishment, "it is not even difficult. There is an art in doing this, but, when you once know it, you find no trouble. It is rhythmic prose in a series of lines. Each line must contain a thought. Langhetti found no difficulty in making rhyming lines, but rhymes are not necessary. This rhythmic prose is as poetic as any thing can be. All the hymns ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... were slightly parted. Her eyelids drooped. Her breast rose and fell in a slow, rhythmic heave. Otherwise she was motionless and faintly smiling, as if she were given up to some blissful languor. And the man spoke on, caressing her imprisoned hand, stroking it, looking at her with the glow of conquest in ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... they rode in silence, their bodies swaying easily to the rhythmic gait of the horses. Their direction lay toward the sun, that direction which ever makes for hope. Ahead of them, and behind them, lay the forest of tall, garbless trunks, their foliage-crowned, disheveled heads nodding in the light breezes from the hilltops, which ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... Veronica. "I thought at first it was mine. Oh, wouldn't there have been a talk about it, if it had been! Oh my! wouldn't there have been a row!" She settled down to a steady rhythmic dance, suggestive of a Greek chorus ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... the stone lay—the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole—the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... o'er the road. A basket picnic, music and croquet Were in the programme. Skies were blue and clear, And cool winds whispered of the Autumn near. The merry-makers filled the time with pleasure: Some floated to the music's rhythmic measure, Some played, some promenaded on ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... and fro. A far-off band was playing in the summer night, at some pier or in an open space, and its music could be faintly heard. Children were shouting as they returned from the Battery. The grind of street cars came in low waves, not unlike the rhythmic beat of the seas which he had never seen. He shut his ears to every sound. Eastward loomed up the iron network of the bridges, delicate and beautiful against the starlit sky. South, and near by, clustered the masts of scores of ships. North and West were the sky-piercing tops of the city's highest ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... the changes wrought in society by its use. The simple activities of gathering food, of weaving, building, taming fire, making use of stones for tools and weapons, wearing trophies, and securing cooperative action by means of rhythmic dances, are here shown to be the simple forms of processes which still minister ...
— The Later Cave-Men • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... song one feels all the freshness and the promise of spring. The song seems to be born of ages of freedom beneath peaceful skies, of the rhythm of the universe, of a mingling of the melody of winds and waters and of all rhythmic sounds that murmur and echo out of doors and of every song that Nature sings in the wild gardens of the world. I am sure I have never been more thoroughly wide awake and hopeful than when listening to the solitaire's song. The world is flushed with ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... elements in Hellenic culture—with the influence which the Greek rhetor or philosopher exercised in his converse with the stern but receptive minds of Rome, the love of books, the new lessons which were to be taught as to the rhythmic flow of language and the rhythmic movement of the limbs. The Greek adventurer was one of the most striking features of the epoch which immediately followed the close of the great wars. Later thinkers, generally ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... he was out of sight, and although the vigorous, rhythmic swing of his broad shoulders was like another manifestation of the morning's joyous, buoyant spirit, it did not move her to a responsive alertness. After he had turned a corner, she lowered her eyes to the cluster of grapes she still held; ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... all those singularities of human life ... which obstruct anything that was really good and great'. [Footnote: Dedication to The Drummer.] His style varies with his mood, and with the degree of his interest. Occasionally it reaches the simple, rhythmic prose of the passage quoted above, but generally it is somewhat abrupt and a little toneless. But now and again we find the 'unexpected splendour' in which Addison is wanting, in phrases like 'a covered indigence, a magnificent poverty', [Footnote: Spectator ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... time-beats say something, always. They force in and in upon the soul its own pulses of thought, or memory, or purpose; of imagination or desire. They weld and consolidate our moods, our elements. Twenty miles of musing to the rhythmic throbbings of a railroad train, who does not know how it can shape and deepen and confirm whatever one has started with in ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... in reserve for him, the avenger had inevitably appeared in the form his own gratified desire. He had withheld his hand from nothing; the thing that he had wanted he had taken without question—impulse and possession had flowed for him with a rhythmic regularity of movement—and yet in glancing back he could place his finger upon no past events and say of them "this brought me happiness—and this—and this." In retrospect his pleasures showed cheap and threadbare—woven of perishable colours, ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... all day long, With a most musical cadence in the hall, A wandering stream lets its slow waters fall In twinkling rhythmic song. ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... dipped, the men in the canoes with one accord, touched off by some quick-blooded French adventurer, set up a chanson,—a beating rhythmic song of Love going into Battle,—and ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... reluctantly and plied the bellows. The heavy panting broke forth simultaneously with the red flare that quivered out into the dark night. Presently it faded; the hot iron was whisked upon the anvil, fiery sparks showered about as the rapid blows fell, and the echoing crags kept time with rhythmic beats to the clanking of the sledge and the clinking of the hand-hammer. The stars, high above the far-stretching mountains, seemed to throb in unison, until suddenly the blacksmith dealt a sharp blow on the face of the ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... is with the volume of the world's business. However well men may try to balance the trend of affairs so as to produce a normal relation between the output and the needs of humanity, the natural laws do not cease to operate in a rhythmic alternation between the high prices which stimulate production and the glut of goods which overtakes the demand of the market ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... were, perhaps, two score of them upon his body and limbs. At the same time, some other person entered the room by the lift, behind Graham. The tailor set moving a mechanism that initiated a faint-sounding rhythmic movement of parts in the machine, and in another moment he was knocking up the levers and Graham was released. The tailor replaced his cloak of black, and the man with the flaxen beard proffered him a little glass of some refreshing fluid. Graham saw over ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... open his camphor-drenched uniform case—left behind with Lance—and unearth the familiar khaki of Kohat and Mespot days; to ride out with his men in the cool of early morning to the gardens at the far end of Lahore. The familiar words of commands, the rhythmic clatter of hoofs, were music in his ears. A thousand pities he was not free to join the Indian Army. But, in any case, there was Rose. There would always be Rose now. And he had an inkling that their angle of vision was ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... nine indispensable sayings of the wise men of China. Other vases of a confused orange and purple, less rigid and dominant, more humble and dreamy, stored symbolically the tea of India. A row of caskets of a simple silvery metal contained tinned meats. Each was wrought with some rude but rhythmic form, as a shell, a horn, a fish, or an apple, to indicate what material had been ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... melody became more and more frequent in Penelope's lessons, and the "exercises" were supplemented by occasional "pieces"—simple, yet boasting a name. But when Penelope played "Down by the Mill," one heard only the notes—accurate, rhythmic, an excellent imitation; when Hester played it, one might catch the whir of the wheel, the swish of the foaming brook, and almost the spicy smell of the sawdust, so vividly was the ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... it seemed to expand and soar, like incense from a swinging censer, and, high and sweet, to pass, at length through the cloudy walls of the world. The music, the words, of this song had no more of art in them than the rhythmic cry of waves that ring on some long beach, or the regular pulsations of the blood that throbs audibly, telling our sudden joys. Yet, natural as it was, it was far more than any other voice of nature; for in it was the human ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... the world with rhythmic beat Is but the passing of your little feet; And all the singing vast of all the seas, Down from the pole To the Hesperides, Is but the praying ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... a curious consideration when once that notice was attracted. He wore a black top-hat, but there was enough in it of those strange curves whereby the decadent artist of the eighties tried to turn the top-hat into something as rhythmic as an Etruscan vase. His hair, which was largely grey, was curled with the instinct of one who appreciated the gradual beauty of grey and silver. The rest of his face was oval and, I thought, rather Oriental; he had two ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... identical throughout, capped with a couplet ab. If these systems be compared with the exact accounts of early French, English, and German lyric in chapters v.-vii., it will be seen that Provencal probably, if not certainly, led the way in thus combining rhythmic arrangement and syllabic proportion with a cunning variation of rhyme-sound. It was also the first language to classify poetry, as it may be called, by assigning special forms to certain kinds of subject or—if not quite this—to constitute ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... Thee Thou art what Thou art, That Thou dost know Thyself what Thou dost know— A perfect, simple, tender, rhythmic heart, Beating Thy blood to all in ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... much out of the ordinary course of things was happening. The first thing to impress itself upon his slowly awakening senses was the fact that the bed upon which he was lying was in motion, a gentle, easy, rhythmic, swaying motion, unlike any movement that he had ever before experienced. Yet the bed seemed to be the same as that upon which he had retired to rest upon the preceding night, so far as he could judge; the mattress had the old familiar feel, and—yes, certainly, he was still under the shelter ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... attempts in this direction, perhaps never more tellingly than in the description of Lavin's morning spent in the harvest field, when he lost his sense of grievance and isolation and felt a strange new brotherhood for the peasants, in proportion as the rhythmic motion of his scythe became one ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... drawing near and there was a rhythmic clicking along the rails. Harris leaned and ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... be some long space of time, all horror and death, during which men fought and heaved and swayed, sometimes beaten back a few feet, then recovering themselves, regaining the lost ground, and pressing on, till in regular rhythmic pulsation rank after rank of warriors tramped on, opening out as they reached the group of dead and wounded men whose core was the spear-slain horse. But in fact it was but a matter of minutes before the pressure ceased as the ranks passed on and a big, heavy-looking man came up, ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... had ample opportunity for observing that her companion was quite as good-looking in detail as in general effect; and the rhythmic inflection of his voice—he spoke in French—she thought truly attuned to his surroundings. He was one of those who, like Italy itself, give to strangers only the suggestion of their meaning, and he interested Nina chiefly ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... never-changing. And so it makes the burden more burdensome. The heavy loads groan and creak along it, and cut deep gashes in its breast. We Poets call to every one to carry all their joys and sorrows lightly, in a rhythmic measure. Our ...
— The Cycle of Spring • Rabindranath Tagore
... swaying bodies. Unfortunately a large part of their liquid melody and flexibility of movement is lost through confinement in cold print; but when they are heard from a distance on quiet summer nights or clear Southern mornings, even the most fastidious ear is satisfied with the rhythmic pulse of them. That pathos of the Negro character which can never be quite adequately caught in words or transcribed in music is then augmented and intensified by the peculiar quality of the Negro voice, rich in overtones, quavering, weird, cadenced, ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... they could to make all our hearts beat young! A picture show across the street sprayed its gay crowd over the sidewalks and a vaudeville house down stairs gathered up rivulets of humanity from the spray. Somewhere near by was a dance, for we heard the rhythmic swish and lisp of young feet and the gay cry of the music. Here and there came a soldier; sometimes we saw a woman in mourning; but uniforms and mourners were uncommon. The war was a tale that ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... divergent lines as the paddles flashed and fell. There was a thud as the blades struck the water, and the long, light hull forged onward with slightly lifted, bird's-head prow, while the two men swung forward for the next stroke with a rhythmic grace of motion. They knelt, facing forward, in the bottom of the craft, and, dissimilar as they were in features and, to some extent, in character, the likeness between them was stronger than the difference. ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... sleet, perchance of snow. And on every side was the rumble of traffic, the voiceful evidence of toil and of poverty; hawkers were crying their goods; the inevitable organ was clanging before a public-house hard by; the crumpet-man was hastening along, with monotonous ringing of his bell and hoarse rhythmic wail. ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... at the brilliant blue arch above him. Then he began to speak rapidly and earnestly; a man just close enough to hear his voice sweeping up to a certain rhetorical climax, pausing there and commencing again with a rhythmic fluency of intonation, might have thought that he was repeating poetry; indeed, it sounded like some of Milton's majestic blank verse, but it was not. Andy was engaged in a methodical, scientific, reprehensibly soul-satisfying ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... accidents or figments of the race, one side of all ingredient or ground of nature. But we shall know that poetry is the real and true state of man; the proper and last ideal of souls, the free beauty they long for, and the rhythmic flow of that universal play in which ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... The rhythmic drowsiness keeps time To hazy subtleties of rhyme That seem to slip Through the lulled soul to seek the sleepy shore. The idle clouds go floating by; Above us sky, beneath us sky; The sun shines on us as ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... and then a sweet low voice rose in the room and seemed to float round them, whilst the words with their rhythmic cadence fell distinctly on the ears of the ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... verse," which once caused some talk in England: the rondel, rondeau, ballade, villanelle, and chant royal. It may be worth while to quote his testimony as to the merit of these modes of expression. "This cluster of forms is one of our most precious treasures, for each of them forms a rhythmic whole, complete and perfect, while at the same time they all possess the fresh and unconscious grace which marks the productions of primitive times." Now, there is some truth in this criticism; for it is a mark ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... she swept the dew-jewels that glistened on the lawn and borders of the gay parterres. She, poor girl! supposing herself unwatched, drank deeply of the morning gladness, her joyous step now and again falling into the rhythmic movements of a dance. She even found herself humming airs that were not sacred—airs forbidden even on weekdays in the puritanic precincts of Rehoboth—airs she had learned in the distant city once her home. Was she not happy? and does not happiness voice itself in song? ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... greet with joy the choral trains Fresh from palms and Cuba's canes. Best gems of Nature's cabinet, With dews of tropic morning wet, Beloved of children, bards and Spring, O birds, your perfect virtues bring, Your song, your forms, your rhythmic flight, Your manners for the heart's delight; Nestle in hedge, or barn, or roof, Here weave your chamber weather-proof, Forgive our harms, and condescend To man, as to a lubber friend, And, generous, teach his awkward race ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... and said: "Shoot the dollar." His style of play was so strenuous that he had to be allowed plenty of room. He shook the dice high above his head, and each time he threw them on the table, he emitted a grunt such as men give when they are putting forth physical exertion with a rhythmic regularity. He frequently whirled completely around on his heels, throwing the dice the entire length of the table, and talking to them as though they were trained animals. He appealed to them in short singsong phrases. "Come, dice," he would say. "Little Phoebe," "Little Joe," "'Way down yonder ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... had just struck twelve, in a leisurely, rhythmic, decorous manner. It was the habit of that tall old narrow-cased clock to accelerate or retard, after its own sweet taste and whim, the uniform and monotonous series of hours that encircle our life until ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... The water was smooth, the moon at its full. It was larger and more brilliant than American moons are, and seemed to possess an actual warmth and color. The boatmen timed their oar-strokes to the cadence of Neapolitan barcaroles and folk-songs, full of rhythmic movement, which seemed caught from the pulsing tides. And when at last the bow grated on the sands of the Sorrento landing-place, Katy drew a long, regretful breath, and declared that this was her best birthday-gift of all, better than ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... methodically arranged four sandwiches, two cookies, and an orange on it. Then, with her fat legs crossed before her, she waited in silence. Between the sun at her back and the fire on her face, she grew pleasantly drowsy; the sounds about her melted imperceptibly to a soft, rhythmic drone; ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... sees a few of our best spectacular plays, and hears good music, and enjoys beautiful rhythmic dancing, she will not be so carried away with ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... hand, began to chop the trunk and a big Swede swung an axe powerfully on the opposite side. The rest of the crew continued to beat down the fires that started below the break. The chips flew at each rhythmic stroke of the keen blades. Presently the tree crashed down into the trail that had been hewn. It served as a conductor, and along it tongues of fire leaped into the brush beyond. Glowing branches, flung ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... window-shaking insistence; it seemed to be the summons of power that all else should stand aside. On they came, these spruce Guards, each man a marching machine, trained to strut and pose exactly as his fellows. There was a sense of omnipotence in their rhythmic movement. And they all had the grand manner—from the elegant captain in command down to the smallest drummer-boy. Although the sun was shining brightly now, the earlier rain and hint of winter in the air had clothed all ranks in dark gray great-coats and brown leggings. Hence, ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... its hinges when she opened it. That sound, too, echoed and re-echoed in rhythmic pulsations that beat painfully upon her ears, but, after she was once ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... unsteady voice trailed away into silence. Peter, out of all the dim beauty of the night, saw only the pale, disturbed, frowning face, the quivering hand that held the lean cigar. All the strangeness and the mystery of the mysterious world were here concentrated. Numbly and dully he heard the soft, rhythmic splashing of the dipping oar, the turning cry of "Premie!" Then, sharper, "Sciar, Signori, sciar!" as they nearly jostled another gondola, swinging round sharply into a moonless ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... in Helen Borisoff's view, the elect, the fortunate. Of love, she had thought more in this last week or two than in all her years gone by. Assuredly, she knew it not, this glory of the poets. Yet she could inspire it in others; at all events, in one, whose rhythmic utterance of the passion ever and again came back ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... not one of weighty message, but of artistic presentation." There seems to be no true contrast here. "The primary concern of the artist must be with his vehicle of expression"—no—not the primary concern. Since the critic adds—(for a poet) "this vehicle is language emotioned to the white heat of rhythmic music by impassioned thought or sensation." Exactly—"thought" it may be. Now part of this same "thought" in Browning is the message. And therefore it is part of his "primary concern". "It is with presentment," says Mr. Sharp, "that the artist has fundamentally to concern himself." Granted: ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... from the point of our single particular seat of energy and feeling, thrills through the vast spheres of human purpose and endeavor, and raises the standard of truth or forwards the advance of enlightened order like each rhythmic melody is gathered in the mightier confluence of chime and strain to swell the ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... feelings, such as happiness and contentment, and even hearing rhythmic sounds, music, etc., are an aid toward increasing output. For the best results, therefore, under Scientific Management the worker is furnished with standard conditions; his train of ideas is held upon ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... always largely in abeyance, while power is absolutely synonymous with potentiality. Fruition requires a continual recovery, a repeated re-establishment of the state we enjoy. So breath and nutrition, feeling and thought, come in pulsations; they have only a periodic and rhythmic sort of actuality. The operation may be sustained indefinitely, but only if it ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... lines they held; the glint of light on the spears they carried upright before them; the weird, but rhythmic, music that passed at intervals, with which they kept step; and, above all, the cheering enthusiasm of the crowd, all seemed like an echo of ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... starting the motor, using the plane's inertia starter, which was driven by an electric motor. Soon the engine coughed, sputtered, and gave rise to a roaring, rhythmic note that Larry ...
— The Pygmy Planet • John Stewart Williamson
... same time another conversation was going on in the rear room of a small printing shop in the heart of the city. It went on to the accompaniment of the rhythmic throb of the presses, and while two printers, in their shirt sleeves, kept guard both at ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... stand Beside the storied sea, Where azure band and golden sand Are wedded ceaselessly; For from the deep, which seems to sleep, The slow waves, long and low, Their journeys done, break one by one In rhythmic ebb ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... out the right slants about oriental effects and who had persuaded Marie there was great consolation to be found in realizing that life is a spiral and that therefore you can't make progress straight up but must go round and round through rhythmic alternations of joy and sorrow, which caused Chunk to relapse again from his attentiveness but which pleased Marie greatly because she was always unhappy in between two periods of happiness and therefore felt she was getting along the spiral and into ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... touching and fearful as is its tone, is made to turn and double fantastically, almost playfully, in many of the lines. The croak of the raven is taken up and moulded into rhyme by a nimble, if not a mocking spirit; and, fascinating as is the rhythmic movement of the verse, it appears like the dancing of the daughter of Herodias. This looks incongruous; and so do the words of the fool which Shakspeare has intermingled with the agonies and imprecations of Lear. In the tragedy, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... to a thrilling sound. He leaned down to place his ear to the sand. Rapid, rhythmic beat of hoofs made him leap to his feet, reaching for his lasso with right hand and a ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... in the same perfect, easy, colloquial style, rich in natural literary allusions and frequently rhythmic with poetic feeling, which marked his latest novel. He also had perfect command of slang and the cockney dialect of the Londoner. No greater master of dialogue or narrative ever wrote than he who pictured the gradual degradation of Becky Sharp or the many ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... and the breeze brought across the fields the sound of fiddles and the rhythmic tramp of feet, softened by the distance. ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... this was life's last miracle, a discovery so fraught with bliss as to be a continual torment. The incitements that were hidden in the softness and the odor of unbound and tumbled hair; the exquisiteness of maiden breasts, moulded of marble, rosy-tipped; the soft contour of snowy limbs, the rhythmic play of moving muscles—to dwell amid these things, to possess them, was suddenly to discover in reality what before had only existed in the realm of ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... her voice changed to a rhythmic, cadenced chant that was almost a song. Her face became rapt and introspective as she rocked slowly from side to side. The rhythm was familiar and then he recognized it—the unintelligible music he had often heard coming from the barracks late at night when no men were around—the voiceless ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... lost his belief that science and modern progress alone possess the power to convey happiness, he extolled their virtues. As a matter of fact, in the festive gleam of the countless electric lights, excited by the wine, the music, and the rhythmic pulse beat of the moving vessel, it seemed to him at times as if humanity in a festal procession with music playing were sailing to the Isles of the Blessed. Perhaps, he said, science may some day ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... up and listened intently. There was the rhythmic beat of footsteps on the sidewalk which Willie had cleared, and a chorus of blithe young voices rang out on the ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... headland to obstruct the sight; and the scenery might even be thought tame and uninteresting, but for a home-born feeling that comes over the kind heart as it approaches so close to the mowers on the meadow-field as to scent the fragrance of the hay; to hear the song of the Boblink, or the rhythmic whetting of the scythe; or passes the ends of those primitive, those pilgrim-fences of post and rail, that enter the brink of the river to mark the boundaries of the small, paternal, and though frequently sterile, the much loved fields ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... rolling softly in their rhythmic beat. The priests who entered showed annoyance at the delay; they gave a curt order, and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... millions are waiting to be stirred and charmed, and will be very thankful to the singer who shall do it for them. Studied obscurity of thought and language, verbal finicalities and conceits, and mere ingenuities of any kind, rhythmic, mental or sentimental, will not meet the occasion: that sort of thing is overdone already. It is the "swollen imposthume" of refinement, an excrescence on culture, a penalty of which we have suffered enough. The ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... the present or past. His songs are a mine of melody, surpassed in wealth only by Schubert, and that only because there are more of Schubert's. In originality of harmony and modulation he has only six equals. Bach, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Wagner and Liszt. In rhythmic invention and combination he is inexhaustible, and as orchestrator he ranks ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... of sad expressive recitative that heralded the plaint and the love-scene. There is here the full charm of fugue: a rhythmic quality of single theme, the choir of concerted dirge in independent and interdependent paths, and with every note of integral melody. There is the beauty of pure tonal architecture blended with the personal significance of the human ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... from the complicated torsion. The succeeding couples, who had only to follow the figures already given, and thus continue the impulsion, were not permitted to drag themselves lazily and listlessly along the parquet. The step was rhythmic, cadenced, and undulating; the whole form swayed by graceful wavings and harmonious balancings. They were careful never to advance with too much haste, nor to replace each other as if driven on by some urgent necessity. On they glided, ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... this latest fad, it is doubtful if its effect is wholly harmful, for it at least introduced vigorous exercise and rhythmic movement into the midnight life of the city. Women went home in the gray dawn with faces flushed from natural causes; exquisite youths of nocturnal habits learned to perspire and to know the feeling ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... a fitting modulation, or tune, avoiding the so- called singsong. Note the occasional closing cadence. Observe the rhythmic ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... are subject to the influence of conscious reaction. As a child's early instinctive acts develop into fixed habits, his growing knowledge aids in making these habits intelligent and effective. Consciousness evidently aids, for example, in developing the instinctive movements of the legs into the rhythmic habitual movements of walking, and those of the hands into the later habits of holding the spoon, knife, cup, etc. Greater still would be the influence of consciousness in developing the crude instinct of self-preservation into the ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... rhythmic character, and consists of a slow and a rapid movement. Physiological nystagmus can be induced by stimulating the movement of the endolymph in the semicircular canals, by syringing the ear with hot and cold water (caloric test), by rotating the individual (rotation ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... organ which filled the vast interior was heard outside, subdued by the walls through which it passed, and was like a beautiful mist or atmosphere of sound pervading and enveloping the great building; and when the plaining of the doves, owing to the rhythmic flow of the notes and their human characters, seemed to harmonize with and be a part of that ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... striking passages in modern literature is the paragraph in Mr. Spencer's First Principles, in which he describes the rhythm of motion. Motion, he says, though it seems to be continuous and steady, is in fact pulsating, undulatory, rhythmic. There is everywhere intermittent action and rest. The flag blown by the breeze floats out in undulations; then the branches oscillate; then the trees begin to sway; everywhere there is action and pause, the ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... we approached Salt Lake into fertile fields and pasture-lands, whose emerald sweep soothed our eyes wearied with so many leagues of ashen monotony, as an old home-strain mollifies the ear irritated by the protracted rhythmic clash or the dull, steady buzz of iron machinery. Contrasting the Mormon settlements with their surrounding desolation, we could not wonder that their success has fortified this people in their delusion. The superficial student of rewards and punishments might ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... inconvenient to you I should be glad to receive the honor of a visit from you; it would interest me greatly to hear of and to become acquainted with your researches concerning Hungarian rhythmic forms. ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... very Iliad itself, if "HOMER" were a native of "Cromer"? (Loud and prolonged cheers.) No! "Jack Horner," or, as it was originally written, "Jakorna," was of Scandinavian origin, and it was, in all probability, a mythmic rhyth—No, beg pardon, he should say a rhythmic myth (Cheers) sung by a wandering Sam Oar Troupe on their visiting Egypt and the Provinces before the time of the Celtic-Phoenician O'SIRIS, or at least before the reign of RAMESES THE FIRST, ancestor of the great Scotch RAMSEY family—(Cheers)—at one of the social ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various
... poor array Like drift upon a barren shore, Perchance we gaze on it and say With vigor, "We will roam no more." But when the year its course hath run, And May completes the rhythmic span, Again, I wot, we'll call ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... produced. You can hardly have too much monotony of surface, but may easily err by having too much variety. Therefore, whatever system of light and shade you may adopt, be careful to repeat its motive in some sort of rhythmic order all over your work; by no other means can you make it rich ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... Spring has loosen'd Winter's thrall; The well-dried keels are wheel'd again to sea: The ploughman cares not for his fire, nor cattle for their stall, And frost no more is whitening all the lea. Now Cytherea leads the dance, the bright moon overhead; The Graces and the Nymphs, together knit, With rhythmic feet the meadow beat, while Vulcan, fiery red, Heats the Cyclopian forge in Aetna's pit. 'Tis now the time to wreathe the brow with branch of myrtle green, Or flowers, just opening to the vernal breeze; Now Faunus claims his sacrifice ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... mechanical. Only here and there, where a drill crew was at work, did an occasional human figure move back and forth in the glare of low-hung incandescents, nevertheless the whole place breathed and throbbed; it was instinct with a tremendous vigor. From all sides came the ceaseless rhythmic clank of pumps, the hiss of gas and steam, the gurgling flow of liquid—they were the pulse beats, the respirations, the blood flow of this live thing. And its body odor stung the nostrils. All night long it panted with its heavy labors—as if the jinns that lifted those giant pump beams were vying ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... matter of fact, a short time after having returned home these boys can hardly be told from ordinary bushmen. The shrieks of the savages pierced the velvet of the night like daggers, but by and by they quieted down, and we heard nothing more but the rhythmic rise ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... the crashing of tiles, the hideous voices of Devil and demon, the prayers of the padre, sounded the silver music of the bells. Not the irregular clash which was the daily result of Indian manipulation, but long rhythmic peals, as sweet and clear and true as the singing of angels. The Devil and his minions, with one long, baffled, infuriated howl, shot upward into space. Simultaneously a great wind came roaring down the valley, ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... ready, and Robert the Devil went well. The long streets rolled behind us, and were lost in the rain; then with a rhythmic drumming of hoofs and a constant splashing from under the whirring wheels, we swept out into the blackness of a treeless plain. I knew the road and did not take the shortest one; and it was rapture to draw the rugs and apron ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... the Sierras, she had gazed upon it for the most part with unseeing eyes, while her thoughts turned, magnet-like, backward to the delights and the bewilderment of the old Mexican town. So now, as the pursuing horseman swept rapidly nearer, each swinging stride of the powerful horse, each rhythmic movement of the graceful rider brought nearer and more vivid the vision of a handsome picador holding off with his lance a thoroughly maddened bull until the ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... The rhythmic friction of stone against steel prolonged suspense unbearably. All kinds of speculation crowded my mind while the leisurely performance went on. The grass was growing rapidly; faster than vegetation had ever grown before. Could it grow so quickly the ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... lyrics have an equal chance of immortality with "The Song of the Shirt" and "The Bridge of Sighs," rising, as they do, right out of the depths of that Inferno, sublime from their very simplicity? Which of Charles Mackay's lyrics can compare for a moment with the Eschylean grandeur, the terrible rhythmic ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... 'The Bride of Messina' show the final phase of his art in its perfection. Like these, the few independent poems written by him during the last years of his life are characterized by great beauty of diction and of rhythmic cadence, but in their substance they hardly compare with the best of his previous work. Most noteworthy are 'Cassandra', devoted to the pathos of foreseeing calamity without being able to prevent it, and 'The Festival of Victory', wherein the Greek heroes, assembled ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... stimulation at intervals of one minute, during half an hour, without detecting the least variation in the responses. But it is of course easier to find others in which the responses as a whole may be taken as regular, though there may be slight rhythmic fluctuations. And even in these cases the effect of reagents is too marked and ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... found and won his mate then the best traditions demand a lyrical interlude. It should be possible to tell, in that ecstatic manner which melts words into moonshine, makes prose almost uncomfortably rhythmic, and brings all the freshness of every spring that ever was across the page, of the joyous exaltation of the happy lover. This at any rate was what White had always done in his novels hitherto, and what he would certainly ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... this living in the souls of one's ancestors, even as on Tabernacles one lived in their booths. A sudden craving seized him to sing with his father, to wrap himself in a fringed shawl, to sway with the rhythmic passion of prayer, to prostrate himself in the synagogue. Why had his brethren ever sought to emerge from the joyous slavery of the Ghetto? His imagination conjured it up as it was ere he was born: the one campo, bordered ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... are musical, and others that are raucous and mere noise. The difference lies in the fact that harsh sounds are compounded of irregular vibrations, while the essence of Music is that its waves are rhythmic and follow each other in ordered swing. Rhythm is thus the primary manifestation of Music: but equally so it is the basic characteristic of everything in life. We learn that in Nature there is nothing still and inert, but that everything ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... and had no confidants. He seldom slept in the same place twice in succession, and though he was wanted by the police, he was not found. In appearance he did not lack distinction of an ominous sort; the slow, rhythmic, perfectly controlled mechanism of his tail, as he impressively walked abroad, was incomparably sinister. This stately and dangerous walk of his, his long, vibrant whiskers, his scars, his yellow eye, so ice-cold, so fire-hot, ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... front of his feet, the air was full of butterflies, a sweet fragrance rose from the wild grasses. The sappy scent of the bracken stole forth from the wood, where, hidden in the depths, pigeons were cooing, and from afar on the warm breeze, came the rhythmic ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... sharply into the desert, revealing an infinite perspective of summits and escarpments in echelon one behind another to the furthest plane of the horizon, like motionless caravans. The now confined river rushes on with a low, deep murmur, accompanied night and day by the croaking of frogs and the rhythmic creak of the sakieh.[*] ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the rhythmic pace drowsy, but our steed was determined to amuse us and benefit himself. So he blew great blasts of spray at his own forelegs and chest to cool himself, and now and then made shocking bad shots at so large a target, ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... little crowd, but Blake looked upon his hesitancy with distrust, and still retaining the grip upon his shoulder, half led, half pushed him through a short passage straight into the dancing-hall, where on the instant his ears were assailed by a flood of joyous sound in the form of a rhythmic, swinging waltz—his eyes blinked before the flood of light to which the Parisian pins his faith for public pleasures—and his nostrils were assailed by a penetrating smell of scent and smoke. Dazed and a little frightened he drew back against a ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... sent us as gently down the long, blue wave slopes to the next broad, upward slope. There was a spell of peace over the ocean, stilling even the Portuguese captain who stood dreamily at the wheel, slowly swaying to the rhythmic lift ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... disorder; no one was hurt, or even knocked down, unless in the game, and that was the game, so it was as it should be. Right in the middle of it, the strains of "Sunday Afternoon," all East Side children's favorite, burst forth, and out of the seeming confusion came rhythmic order as the whole body of children moved, ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... front of him with a slow and rhythmic movement; her cloak, lined with fur as white as swan's-down, was unclasped at the throat, and slipping back, revealed her shoulders, pale as polished ivory, the shoulder-blades disappearing into the lace of the corsage with ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... voice was hard with pain. The night was very black. In the dark silence they could hear the rhythmic thunder of the waves pounding monotonously ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... clustered at the mouth of the cave, and the two lanterns, held high, beat back the gloom for a few yards. Ichi shouted orders to his men, and his words were hardly audible above the deep, rhythmic moan that rose steadily from somewhere beneath their feet. Martin peered into the cavern; it was huge, he knew, but he could not ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... open plain, seemingly without end. The sun glinted from their upraised, polished spears; their ostrich plumes swayed gently as though a wind ruffled a field of sombre grain tassels; the anklets and leg bracelets clashed softly together to produce in the aggregate a rhythmic marching cadence. Their front was nearly a quarter of a mile in width. Rank after rank in succession appeared: literally thousands. Drums roared and throbbed; and the blowing of innumerable trumpets, fashioned mostly from the horns of oryx and sing-sing, ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... sound of feet, many of them in unison. We darted into a doorway, crouched behind a balustrade. Nearer came the feet, and I peered between the interstices of the screening balustrade. The feet came on; slow, rhythmic, marching without zest or pause or break, perfection without snap. As the first marching figure came into sight in the moonlight, I shuddered to the core with ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... from our lights glances in broken splashes of colour over the waters, as the squat craft heaves and rolls with rhythmic regularity. From somewhere below comes the monotonous throb of the protesting engines. A red light gleams suddenly on our starboard, and I catch my breath. AEons pass, it seems, before a panther-like clutch at the wheel carries us aside in time to let the offender plunge drunkenly past. We were ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various |
